Zora Neale Hurston's Lost Decade
The Harlem Renaissance writer's obscure and 
impoverished final years are being rehabilitated.
By Eve Ottenberg
In These Times
April 8, 2011
http://www.inthesetimes.org/article/7077/zora_neale_hurstons_lost_decade

For Zora Neale Hurston the 1950s were years in which she
struggled to survive. The story of her last 10 years
might sound like a gloomy tale, but in Virginia Lynn
Moylan's Zora Neale Hurston's Final Decade (University
of Florida) this is not at all the case.

True, at age 60, Hurston - the author of the 1937 novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God who first made her mark in
the Harlem Renaissance in the late 1920s - had to fight
"to make ends meet" with the help of public assistance.
At one point she worked as a maid on Miami Beach's Rivo
Alto Island.

But Hurston was still active and productive during her
final years, and did not end up at the extreme of
literary catastrophe (exemplified by Edgar Allen Poe,
who died an alcoholic in a gutter), though in 1948 she
was falsely accused of having molested a 10-year-old boy
- a scandal that nearly drove her to suicide at the
beginning of this last decade. (Her passport proved she
was in Honduras at the time of the alleged crime.)

Though she would have been loath to admit it, Hurston
suffered because she was black and a woman - two factors
that stood in the way of her being able to publish her
work. But despite repeated rejection, she kept writing,
especially about her historical research on the Hebrew
king Herod.

Since her death, Hurston's reputation has received two
major rehabilitations. The first was a 1975 Alice Walker
essay in Ms. magazine, "In Search of Zora Neale
Hurston," and the second the 2005 TV movie version of
Their Eyes Were Watching God, produced by Oprah Winfrey
and starring Halle Berry. Now that Hurston's place in
the pantheon of American writers is secure, it is
unsettling to see her in Zora Neale Hurston's Final
Decade, going hat-in-hand to publishers and employers at
an age when she should have been enjoying her retirement
and resting on her laurels.

Moylan, an educator and independent scholar, observes
that universities all over the world had her books in
their syllabi, yet none offered her a teaching position.
So she became a substitute teacher at a local high
school in Florida, wrote freelance articles for
newspapers that paid sporadically and moved frequently
due to poverty.

Hurston was in some ways a conservative. She fought with
Richard Wright and fell out with her old friend Langston
Hughes. Both conflicts concerned their leftist politics
and sympathy to communism. As Moylan points out, Hurston
was a devotee of the meritocratic philosophy of Booker
T. Washington.

Hurston wanted her people to pull themselves up by their
bootstraps. On the subject of blacks who emulate whites,
she wrote in 1934: "Fawn as you will. Spend an eternity
standing awe-struck, but until we have placed something
upon his street corner that is our own, we are right
back where we were when they filed our iron collars
off."

Hurston, the anthropologist and folklorist, who studied
at Barnard with Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret
Mead, never lost her focus on the uniqueness of African-
American culture. She bucked the conventions of the
black literary establishment and had her characters
speak in black dialect.

Hurston was also a contrarian politically. She vocally
opposed school desegregation and, as Moylan writes,
"blamed the NAACP, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and
the Brown decision for what she perceived as the `hate-
filled, stinking mess' in which southern blacks and
whites found themselves."

Yet years earlier, in 1945, Moylan writes that Hurston
had criticized American foreign policy for supporting
"democracy abroad while `subjugating the dark world
completely' through its sanctioning of Jim Crow at
home." Hurston must have known very well that Jim Crow
had more to do with that "hate-filled, stinking mess"
than the NAACP, but in the heat of journalistic combat
could not admit that. Instead, she belittled the idea of
a court order that would compel someone to associate
with her who did not want to. She seems not to have
considered the perspective of ordinary mortals, who
might in fact need a court order to go to a better
school.

Moylan argues that regarding education, Hurston was a
black separatist, and devotes pages to defending
Hurston's diatribes against Brown v. The Board of
Education. Though at first it may seem jarring, this is
in fact one of the most nuanced sections of a much-
needed book, one that illuminates the last, nearly
destitute years of a great writer's life, years
previously cloaked in obscurity. These years have been
"a period that might appear outwardly unprofitable,"
Hurston wrote in a 1957 letter. "But . I have made
phenomenal growth as a creative artist. . I am not
materialistic. If I do happen to die without money,
somebody will bury me, though I do not wish it to be
that way."

And on Jan. 28, 1960, Hurston died in the St. Lucie
County Welfare Home.

Eve Ottenberg recently published a novel, Dead in Iraq
(Plain View Press, 2008), and has written book reviews
in the New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, The New
Yorker's "In Brief" section, the Baltimore Sun, USA
Today, The Nation, The Washington City Paper, The
Washington Post and many other newspapers and magazines.

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